


Promenade

by frozen_delight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode: s11e15 Beyond the Mat, Gen, Season/Series 11 Spoilers, Supernatural Spring Fling 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-29
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-29 21:17:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6394192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_delight/pseuds/frozen_delight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam's life is a gallery of loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Promenade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [madebyme_x](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=madebyme_x).



> Written for the lovely madebyme_x as part of this year's spnspringfling challenge.
> 
> Many, many thanks to my quick and generous beta zara_zee!

Sam should have known better than to tell Dean, “Stay out of my room!” After all, Dean’s grown up to treat the very existence of the law as an invitation to break it. 

So it’s not uncommon for Sam to come back to his room from his morning run and discover soap on his toothbrush, Skittles in his bed or itching powder in his underwear.

Today, it’s the poster of a young, curvy blonde hanging above his bed. Rio.

For one moment, Sam allows himself to smile. Then he takes it down.

There’s something magical about pictures, and not in the Harry Potter way. It’s better not to engage with them, not to leave them out in the open. They’ll only let you down.

***

The first picture in the somber gallery of Sam’s life features his teacher Mrs. Jennings. It’s a cut-out from an old yearbook he found lying around on the playground.

Each day, Mrs. Jennings smiles at him and asks him how he is. Sam thinks she looks a little bit like his mom on the photograph of Mom and Dad which Dean keeps in his duffel. When Dad and Dean aren’t looking, he kisses the picture before going to bed and imagines it’s Mom wishing him goodnight.

One day, Mrs. Jennings retains him after class. She asks all sorts of question about Dad and Dean, all with a kind smile. Sam’s never had the chance to talk to someone who’s willing to listen, except Dean of course, and it feels so good.

That night Child Services comes to their motel room. Dad’s angry, Dean’s pale. They leave town and never come back.

At the next rest stop, Sam flushes Mrs. Jennings’ picture down the toilet. He makes sure not to trust any of his teachers again.

*

Coyly, Rio smirks down at him when he’s nine or ten. It makes him feel warm all over.

“Sammy’s got a crush,” Dean singsongs and pokes Sam in the ribs when Sam sticks out his tongue at him. It’s annoying as hell.

Then Dad comes back from his latest hunt and drags them out of the motel in a matter of five minutes. Sam barely has the time to put on his socks. In the rush, he forgets to pack the poster, and it’s not like Dad’s one of those people where you can say, “Please turn back.”

Soon Sam misses Dean’s ribbing and the warm feeling in his belly. Just for a moment, he allows himself to indulge in the fantasy that he’s forgotten his .45 instead, before he quashes that thought and joins Dean in their daily weapon training.

*

Dean would laugh if he knew that Sam’s never goofed around in a photo booth before. But Dean isn’t there. There’s just him and Amy, elbowing each other and pulling faces. He just punched two guys. Blood trickles down his face. For the first time in his life, he really feels like a hero.

But Amy’s mom is the monster they’re hunting.

And years later, they’re hunting Amy too.

He doesn’t tell Dean about Amy back then. Dean’s dropped out of school like hunting’s all that matters, hooks up with a new chick every night and throws punches whenever someone gets too near, both literally and in a figurative sense.

*

In his final year he receives the assignment to find a picture which represents his biggest dream and to write an essay about it.

Ever the supportive and obnoxious big brother, Dean buys him the latest _Playboy_ issue.

“Ugh.” Sam grimaces in disgust like it’s expected of him. “Biggest dream, dumbass, not buggiest. Look it up in a dictionary.” He smacks Dean on top of his head for good measure, because being taller still hasn’t lost its charm.

“Too bad,” Dean quips back with a meaningful glance at Sam’s crotch and teases Sam mercifully about all the differences between _tall_ and _big_ for the next hour.

Later, when Dean’s under the shower humming an off-key version of _Pretty Woman_ , Sam cuts out a picture of the Stanford University campus from one of the brochures his counselor handed him.

Dean doesn’t comment on it, but he looks at Sam different now.

Sam feels a little bad about it. He hates himself for not feeling bad enough, and for feeling bad at all.

*

Jess has four brothers, three uncles, twelve cousins and a friend circle that could fill a soccer stadium. Accordingly, when they move in together, she puts up pictures of family and friends on every wall and surface.

Sam can only contribute a photograph of his parents. Dean thrust it into his hands at the bus station, wrapped up in wad of fifties.

He doesn’t have a picture of Dean. It might be a good thing, since he doesn’t think he’d be able to stay if he had a constant reminder of everything he left behind.

When his apartment goes up in flames—Jess, photos, memories, dreams, everything—and Dean’s all he’s got left, the absence of his picture acquires an almost symbolic significance.

*

By the time Sam gets a house together with Amelia, he possesses a nice collection of pictures. Unlike Dad, Bobby had taken the time to snap them again and again when they visited. 

Hope and confidence beam at him from his younger self’s features. More often than not, Dean’s got an arm around him, fixing the camera with a stare that’s half defiant, half insecure. Sam still remembers the firm press of Dean’s shoulders, the daredevil grin, the comforting reassurances, “As long as I'm around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you.” But that whiff of fragility? He doesn’t think Dean’s ever looked like that, not really.

He wonders what Amelia would gather from those pics. If she’d understand him better, or even less.

He never finds out, because by the time Dean returns from purgatory, they still haven’t unpacked all their boxes.

*

Despite all these previous experiences, he allows a photograph of Dean and him sharing a beer after he got his soul back to give him the strength to finish curing the demon who says he’s his brother. And it works. Like a charm.

So he relies on two other pictures to bring Dean back from the brink of sure destruction.

“Let these be your guide,” he says. “They can help you remember what it was to be good…what it was to love.”

It works, again.

But he should have known better than to place his faith in pictures. They lie, they betray.

After Amara, after Lucifer, after Cas, he has to accept that they’ve thrown him into yet another cascade of loneliness, of evil, of loss.

But he’s determined to weather it, as long as he possibly can. He owes that to the rest of the world, to Dean and himself, and to their joint history.

***

Once he’s finished folding up the poster, he retrieves his memory box from under the bed. About to open it, he looks up and spots Dean in the doorway.

“Sorry for messing with your room, Sammy,” Dean says. He’s never apologized before. Not for the toothbrush, not for the Skittles, not for the itching powder. It’s that, and not Dean’s heartbroken face, which clues Sam in on just how bad it is. Dean always looks heartbroken these days. They all do.

“It’s not—” Sam begins. Swallows. “It’s just—thanks, man.”

“It’s okay, it was stupid—”

“No, it was really sweet…uh _awesome_ ,” he corrects himself, when Dean makes a face. “I just—I’m putting it in here.” He gestures at his memory box. “It’s where—it’s where I keep things.”

“Oh.” The surprise on Dean’s face isn’t feigned, Sam knows him too well for that. It warms his heart to think that for all his disrespect of Sam’s privacy, Dean’s obviously never attempted to open the box. 

One day he’s going to show Dean the contents. One day soon.

Sam expects Dean’s eyes to perform their customary my-little-brother-is-the-weirdest-geek-to-ever-geek dance, but instead they soften, and Dean says, “I get it.”

It strikes Sam then that for all his domestic inclinations Dean has never bothered to purchase frames for the photos displayed in his room. They lie on his nightstand, on his dresser, as if they’d carelessly been forgotten there. And yet Sam knows exactly how much his brother cherishes each one of them.

“Yeah, you do,” he agrees with a strange sense of relief and gives Dean’s shoulder a quick squeeze.

Maybe in his own way, Dean’s just as wary of the permanence those pictures offer and fail to protect, no more substantial than footsteps in the sand.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. Feedback is love.
> 
> You can also talk to me here: [LJ](http://frozen-delight.livejournal.com/) | [Tumblr](http://frozen-delight.tumblr.com/)


End file.
